John Dillon

John Dillon (1851-1927) spent nearly fifty years in the forefront of Irish politics, but he lived to see his party destroyed, himself unhonoured and forgotten, and everything he had lived and fought for discarded as irrelevant. Yet his career, which ended in disillusionment and in what the world calls failure, is an important chapter in the modern history of Anglo-Irish relations. Dillon's own experience ranged from the earliest days of the Home Rule movement to the rise of Sinn Fein, from Butt and Parnell to Griffith and de Valera. One of Parnell's earliest and most brilliant lieutenants, Dillon earned a reputation for himself as one of the leaders of the Irish peasants in the Land War. At the split he became one of Parnell's principal opponents and for a time led the anti-Parnellite party in the 'nineties. When the Irish party was reunited in 1900, Dillon gave his loyalty to John Redmond whose adviser he remained until the latter's death in 1918. It was left to Dillon to fight a gallant but unsuccessful campaign in the general election of 1918 which swept his party into oblivion. John Dillon was a man of remarkable education and cultivation whose interests far outran those of the politics to which his working life was devoted. This biography is an exceptionally well-documented account, drawn from Dillon's own archives as well as from other sources, of a life full of incident and struggle.